Meet Our New Assistant Editors

Notches’ Assistant Editor program recognizes and mentors promising graduate students who have an interest in digital humanities and public history and who are conducting cutting edge research on the history of sexuality. We are pleased to introduce our assistant editors for 2015-2016.

Mackenzie Anne Cooley is a Ph. D. candidate in the Stanford University Department of History, minoring in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her dissertation, “Generating Utopia: The Quest to Perfect Nature in Renaissance Italy, Spain, and the Spanish Americas, 1450-1620” explores perceptions of breeding in the sixteenth century, how utopian ideals affected animal and human bodies, and what that meant for the Spanish Empire. This research is supported by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Mellon Dissertation Fellowship in the Humanities on Original Sources. Mackenzie has also promoted programming on “Bioethics and the Gendered Body” and is a founding member of the Research Group on Collective Trauma and Healing at Stanford. She tweets from @rovingnome

Saniya Lee Ghanoui is a media historian researching the cultural history of sex hygiene films in the United States and Sweden. Her current doctoral work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign looks at how sex hygiene films transitioned from public theaters to schools and issues of censorship, technology, and sexuality; examines the films’ position and status; and explores their place in sex education curricula. Her research is rooted in gender and women’s studies, STS studies, media studies, and visual culture. She graduated with her MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU; her MA in Journalism from Emerson College; and her BA in Communication Arts from Marymount Manhattan College. Saniya tweets from @saniya1

Katya Motyl is a PhD candidate in Modern European History at the University of Chicago, as well as a Residential Fellow at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS). Her research interests include gender and sexuality in Central Europe, feminist and queer theory, embodiment, and the history of emotions. She is currently writing a dissertation that examines the history of sexuality in Vienna from 1893 to 1931 by looking to and feeling through women’s embodiment. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, the Österreichisches Austauschdienst (OeAD), as well as the Social Sciences Division (SSD) and Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS) at the University of Chicago. She is also working on a side project that examines the configuration of romantic love in long distance relationships in early twentieth century Central Europe. Katya tweets from @k_motyl

Whitney Wood is a PhD Candidate (ABD) in the Department of History at Wilfrid Laurier University (WLU) in Waterloo, Canada. Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, her doctoral project explores the history of medical and cultural attitudes towards female bodies, pregnancy, childbirth, and labour pain in late-19th and early-20th century English Canada. Her research has appeared in the Canadian Bulletin of Medical Historyand the edited collection Pain and Emotion in Modern History(Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). She has taught the history of sexuality at WLU and the University of Waterloo in both traditional classroom and online formats. Her next research project, currently in its early stages, will be a study of the natural childbirth movement in postwar Canada. She tweets from @whitneylwood

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ABOUT

NOTCHES is a peer-reviewed, collaborative and international history of sexuality blog that aims to get people inside and outside the academy thinking about sexuality in the past and in the present. We engage with histories of sex and sexuality across all regions, periods, and themes. NOTCHES is likewise strengthened by the diversity of our contributors, who come from a range of professional and personal backgrounds.